Part V! Ah well, its patch day…
If you conduct criminal activities there are likely to be consequences – provided you are caught of course. In order to develop out the theme of smuggling I introduced an idea a post or so ago that ‘contraband’ is something illegal in some fashion and that includes stolen items. The reason for that is because I see ‘crime’ in EVE in homogeneous terms – smuggling boosters, stealing ore, podding someone they’re all ‘crimes’ and I’ve participated in all of them at some stage or another.
Currently in EVE if you get caught by NPCs “smuggling” you get forced to either hand back the goods, or go home in a concord induced pod. Theft results in a flagging you against your victim as does violent aggression at least for a time. For the purposes of this exercise assume that the normal flagging / aggression system works as normal with the following additions:
Stolen goods act like contraband (see the previous post) – whilst theyre in your cargo hold there’s a risk(increasing over time) that they will no longer be concealed from the authorities. Once this occurs two things will happen.
1. You suffer a security rating penalty (a relatively small one)
2. A Warrant is issued at each station in your constellation. OR
3. You’re in Null Sec, in which case nothing happens as this is an un regulated area of space.
Warrants appear in the Bounty Office of a station. Here they can be collected by would be Bounty Hunters. Each Warrant provides Kill Rights to the Bounty Hunter – he can attack and destroy the fugitives ship and POD anywhere without penalty. The Warrant also provides a ‘last known location’ which is where ever our fugitive happened to be when the Warrant was issued.With the limited ‘last known location’ information the BH now has to seek out the Fugitive. Its worth noting that the only information publicly visible through the Bounty Office is “Fugitive Last Seen in XXXX’ so you cant expect to leave an alt in a Bounty Office to collect your mains Warrant. The way I would like this to work would equate to blood hound following a scent. Over time that scent will fade, allowing the fugitive to potentially escape. This is how I see this working:
Initially the BH will be able to see the recent (last 30 minutes) gate activations of his target fugitive in the region he is currently in – as per the statistics on the universe map. After that 30 minutes the “gate activation” map data increases its time lag to the last 2 hours, then 4 hours, 8 hours, 16 and finally 24 hours. After 24 hours the trail has ‘gone cold’ and no further information can be gleaned from that source. Of course that doesn’t include worm holes or Jump Bridge / Covert Cynos, meaning a well supported or stealthy fugitive can potentially go off the grid – at least to an extent. Nor does it prevent a BH using traditional locator Agents.
“That all sounds great Cailais, but as a Bounty Hunter how am I getting paid!?”
Glad you asked. You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned player submitted Player donated bounties, and that’s for a very good (& possibly controversial) reason. There aren’t any.
“WHAAT?!”
Yup. You see the reason Ive decided to remove them entirely is because they’re unnecessary and introduce to many problematic issues in terms of Alts and so forth. They’re unnecessary because you dont need a player allocated bounty to create a fugitive: it doesnt add any additional game play because ultimately if you want revenge on another player you can hire mercs or anyone else for that matter through normal social interaction. It doesn’t need a mechanic behind it. So how does our erstwhile Bounty Hunter make a living?
First off the BH doesn’t take any standing hit, so he can collect the loot from a perished fugitive. Additionally the Bounty Hunter is paid any insurance on the destroyed vessel: not the victim. Secondly if he collects the corpse as a result of a pod kill he is paid the value of that players Clone at time of podding. Admittedly that might not be a vast sum of ISK but if the ship is uninsured its at least some recompense. Critically this process cant be abused by using an Alt for ‘self claiming’ as as a player you’ll only get back as much as you lose – a net gain of Zero.
For the final Part VI of this journey I will try and add a little more numbers and perhaps a flow chart to describe the process. There are also a couple of sketchy areas that I need to go back and consider (no doubt you’ve already spotted those). In the mean time of course any comments are welcome and I hope this short series has been a distraction from waiting on TQ to fire back into life 😀
C.